Crown Collection from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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My apologies, I was quite lazy today and so must resort to crawling through the “Misc” folder of the old Boutique for material. The Misc folder is easily the most interesting one, containing as it does movie replicas, concoctions colored on the computer, outfits other people sent to me and the pets. But I’d forgotten all about these crowns. They must be from later in the Boutique’s history, I think I see the influence of the colorless blender. I think they might work on Sylvia, too…

Rachael’s Black Suit from Blade Runner

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“Do you like our owl?”

Yeah, this owl, the Official Kerr Family Owl:

Brian and I saw Blade Runner on the big screen the other day, and it was glorious, much like Rachael’s hair when it’s freed from those tight rolls. I don’t know if the book described really ugly clothes as Ubik did (now there’s a paperdoll I haven’t done yet that cries for a yellow houndstooth poncho and green leather boots!), but if it did the movie was ever so faithful to it. I just about cried whenever there was a closeup on Deckard’s shirt, that thing was perfectly hideous. But this outfit that Rachael wears in the beginning I liked, even if I can’t quite add the achingly noir cigarette smoke, and even if it did turn out a shade more “grey” then “black,” and even if the shoulder pads aren’t quite padded enough…

(Yes, incidentally, Brian is a graduate of the Calvin School of Art…)

Pink and Red Fairy Dress from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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Honestly, I wasn’t quite feeling the whole paperdolling thing today after having three starts to another outfit go bad, so I decided to redraw one of the old Boutique fairy outfits. I’m not really thrilled with it, but it’s better than not posting anything at all…

Pink and Yellow Chiffon 1940s Evening Gown Via Damn Good Vintage

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Julie the Vintage Goddess linked to me recently and said some very kind things about my dolls. She also buys and sells vintage clothing from her site Damn Good Vintage, so I was looking through her site and her blog for some inspiration when I found this post, “You Can’t Save Them All”. It tells of her attempts to restore two dresses, one of which was too stained to save, and one of which was a yellow and pink chiffon 1940s evening gown that cleaned up nicely, but tore easily and couldn’t be saved either. Well, if there’s one thing paperdolls are good for, it’s to right the wrongs of damage and time. Or to put it simply, Paperdolls 1, Real Life 0.

Blue and White Convertible-Sleeved Evening Dress From “In the Year 2000: Clothing of the Future”

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Erin at A Dress A Day linked to this video from the 1930s, “In The Year 2000: Clothing Of The Future” and, well, convertible sleeves FTW. Or, to quote the video, “One idea is a dress that can be adapted for morning, afternoon or evening. It’s the sleeves what does it!” So the white part is actually the inside of the sleeve, secured by the little silver hangy thing at the top and threaded underneath the belt. You’ll see if you watch the video a couple of times. We didn’t really get a good look at the skirt, and I think the original is a little fuller, but what the heck, I lived through the year 2000, I can take some liberties.

The rest of the video, which promises to show us “what Eve will look like in AD 2000,” is well worth a watch, too. I wish we got a better look at the aluminum dress…

Oh, and Go Fug Yourself is holding the Fug Madness tournament soon, so if you have a high tolerance for fugly, don’t forget to vote. I predict at least one paperdoll will come from the contest. (I’m not so sure they’ve got room to talk with those horrendous American Apparel dress ads on their site, but I guess money is money. Ooh, I hope that doesn’t show up in my ads now…)

5th Century AD Upper-Class Celtic Woman In Saffron and Green Léinte and Green Brat (for St. Patrick’s Day)

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Wikipedia says that “uncritical acceptance of the Annals of Ulster would imply that he [St. Patrick] lived from 373 to 493″ and for the purpose of paperdolling, I can be uncritical. This is my guess at what an upper-class Celtic woman might have worn during the time of St. Patrick. She wears a sleeveless saffron-dyed, heavily embroidered léine, which is a linen tunic, over another light green sleeved léine. At this point, the sleeves, if there were any, were long and straight; the larger sleeves that you might see at a Renaissance fair come later. The green fabric she wears as a cloak is called a brat, and it’s made of wool and edged with gold. She pins the brat with a white bronze penannular brooch, and she wears a woven leather belt.

I cannot say that this is entirely historically accurate; I’ve read about clothes from that time and done my best to make it so, but I’m no expert. I read a lot of great resources about clothing from this time period:

Ceara ni Neill’s Early Period Online
Paul Du Bois’ Book of Kells Images
Clothing of the Ancient Celts
Echna’s Celtic Clothing Page
Crafty Celts

Also, if you’re looking at the dress and thinking “Well, how would someone actually cut that out? Or were hand amputations common in the 5th century?” my advice would be to cut a line between the edge of the sleeve and the cloak and slip her hand through it. This is, of course, if you have already followed my advice (given somewhere…) to cut Sylvia’s hand away from her hip, so that dresses like Margaret Hale’s gown work better.

Brian told me I should have done something for Saint Urho. Maybe next year.

Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique Formal Dresses, Part 1

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I find myself, at the time of this writing, with a terrible headache and no drawings stored up in reserve… so instead of silence I thought I’d post some of my old Boutique dresses and one of the dolls.

When I was in high school and college, I ran a site called “Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique” for which I drew dresses and dolls. It got to be really rather sprawling, and was great fun, although my laziness, perfectionism and inability to really focus on more than one thing with  all my heart caught up to me and it slipped away at some point. These are from that old site.

I don’t remember which birthday it was when I got my set of 120 Prismacolors — though I bet my mom could — but in any case, these date somewhere to maybe sophomore or junior year of high school, 1997, 1998. (I’m very bad with dates…) I still remember details about some of them… the blue dress was a request from some paperdoll fan, and the gold dress was my first try at gold, and really my technique hasn’t changed too much. Also, I don’t do the outlines with black ink anymore, and I use the colorless blender instead of white… I don’t think my dolls look a lot better, though, and I post this one with some embarrassment, but hey, it’s history!

Archades NPC red dress from Final Fantasy XII

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This is just a red gown worn by a random Archades resident in Final Fantasy XII. I thought the original in the game was really pretty, but I don’t like how the drawing came out in the first place, though, and then my scanner ate it and playing around in Photoshop didn’t make it better. (Note to self: until new scanner arrives next week, white things scan better…)

It turns out that I don’t know how to color copper. So, once I figure it out, expect to see a mermaid with a copper tail soon, to compliment her gold-tailed sister…

Princess Ashe’s Wedding Dress from Final Fantasy XII

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So I started playing Final Fantasy XII again recently. (It works nicely with my job. For my fifteen minute breaks, I do dishes and pick up, and on my half-hour break I go beat up some skeletons.) I think the thing I love most about the game is the lushly textured world design… everything is just so pretty. Funny, then, that I don’t really like the character designs for the main characters, except Fran and Balthier. (Don’t get me started on Penelo’s weird leather wings … or Ashe’s little sailor collar… or Vaan the most well-dressed orphaned urchin ever … or Basch’s potholder) I was thinking that I should paperdoll the NPCs, because each major area has its own style, and the female townspeople always looked really cool to me, especially the Arcades women. Luckily, I found a great Ashe shrine that has screen captures of the dress, plus the original concept art, which meant I got to abandon my half-hearted sketch of her regular costume and go for this one instead!

This is Ashe’s wedding dress, and you see it in the very first part of the game, followed soon after by her mourning dress. If I didn’t do the wedding dress, I’d have done a white dress she wears that I also liked, which as it turns out is just a white and grey version of her mourning dress. Maybe another day…

Scanner messed this one up too, but I fixed it up well enough. Does anyone have any idea why it does that? It scans intially sort of softer and the colors are true to the page, then when the scan or preview is done, the colors get more saturated and it looks kind of like someone ran a sharpen filter on the whole thing…

Moxie’s Tonic’s pink shirtwaist inspired by Pushing Daisies

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So I saw that Moxie Tonic had linked to me, and when I clicked through the first thing I saw was this sweet, hot pink dress she had made. It’s inspired by a character’s dress from a TV series called Pushing Daisies, although she made some changes to it. I don’t actually use hot pink much, so of course I wanted to try paperdolling it… It’s not quite like the original, I’m afraid, I think I didn’t get the collar right at all, and there’s too many buttons. I’ll pretend that it’s so blindingly pink no one will notice…

Sadly, though, my scanner kind of ate this one — I don’t know why, but when I scanned it, it previewed normally, but the actual colors ended up being weirdly super-saturated — yes, it’s possible even for hot pink — and it seemed to come out more… coarse, somehow. Lily’s gown yesterday did that too. (Plus this one has a few bands on the skirt…) It means I had to play around in Photoshop and try to make the coloring look like what I had, although it’s a lot less pink now, and it’s not so bad when resized. (The large image you see is 25% of the original, which ends up hiding a lot of flaws.) When I get a new scanner, I’m rescanning it, and then you all can enjoy how it’s supposed to be. On the upside, the dress looks pretty cute in blue, too.